Díaz-Bigio v. Santini’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 federal appellate · 20 district ·

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “One aspect of the analysis focuses on the clarity of the law at the time of the alleged civil rights violation. To overcome qualified immunity, the contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. The other aspect focuses more concretely on the facts of the particular case and whether a reasonable defendant would have understood that his conduct violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.... Cognizant of both the contours of the allegedly infringed right and the particular facts of the case, the relevant, dispositive inquiry in determining whether a right is clearly established is whether it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted. That is, the salient question is whether the state of the law at the time of the alleged violation gave the defendant fair warning that his particular conduct was unconstitutional.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 892 F. Supp. 2d 347 - Facey v. Dickhaut · 91 F. Supp. 3d 12 - Facey v. Dickhaut

2. ““[immunity exists even where the abstract ‘right’ invoked by the plaintiff is well-established, so long as the official could reasonably have believed ‘on the facts’ that no violation existed.” Dirrane v. Brookline Police Dep’t, 315 F.3d 65, 69 (1st Cir.2002). Although the Supreme Court has made clear that municipal officers can “be on notice that their conduct violates established law even in novel factual circumstances,” Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 741 , 122 S.Ct. 2508 , 153 L.Ed.2d 666 (2002), it has also stressed that qualified immunity “protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law,’ ” al-Kidd, 131 S.Ct. at 2085 (quoting Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 , 106 S.Ct. 1092 , 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986)).”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 974 F. Supp. 2d 110 - Kaczorowski v. Town of North Smithfield · 94 F. Supp. 3d 21 - Meagher v. Andover School Committee

3. “(a) whether the legal contours of the right in question were sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would have understood that what he was doing violated that right, and (b) whether the particular factual violation in question would have been clear to a reasonable official.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Velázquez-Vélez v. Molina-Rodríguez